In the South, a Force To Challenge the G.O.P.

By ADAM NOSSITER and JANNY SCOTT

Published: May 16, 2008

The sharp surge in black turnout that Senator Barack Obama has helped to generate in recent primaries and Congressional races could signal a threat this fall to the longtime Republican dominance of the South, according to politicians and voting experts.

Should Mr. Obama become the Democratic nominee, he would still have to struggle for white swing voters in the South and in border states like West Virginia, where he lost decisively to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Tuesday's presidential primary. In West Virginia, where more than three-fourths of white voters chose Mrs. Clinton, 20 percent of the white voters said the race of the candidate mattered in their choice.

But in Southern states with large black populations, like Alabama, Mississippi and Virginia, an energized black electorate could create a countervailing force, particularly if conservative white voters choose not to flock to Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta, predicts ''the largest black turnout in the history of the United States'' this fall if Mr. Obama is the nominee.

To hold these states, Republicans may have to work harder than ever. Already, turnout in Democratic primaries this year has substantially exceeded Republican turnout in states like Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Some analysts suggest that North Carolina and Virginia may even be within reach for the Democratic nominee, and they point to the surprising result in a Congressional special election in Mississippi this week as an indicator of things to come.

With the strong support of black voters, a conservative white Democrat, Travis W. Childers, scored an upset victory in that race, in a district held by Republicans since 1995. Kelvin Buck, a black state representative who helped the Childers campaign, said he saw a ''level of enthusiasm and energy'' that he had not seen before from black voters -- significantly motivated, he said, by a recent Republican anti-Obama campaign.

The numbers appear to bear that out. In one black precinct in the town of Amory, Miss., the number of voters nearly doubled, to 413, from the Congressional election in 2006, and this for a special election with nothing else on the ballot. Meanwhile, in a nearby white precinct, the number of voters dropped by nearly half.

A similar increase has been evident in Southern states with presidential primaries this year. In South Carolina, the black vote in the primary more than doubled from 2004, to 295,000, according to exit poll estimates. In Georgia, it rose to 536,000 from 289,000.

One expert on African-American politics, David A. Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, called those numbers ''almost astounding.'' Black turnout also shot up in states like Maryland, Virginia and Louisiana, even after Hurricane Katrina had driven many Louisianians out of state.

Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: ''This is going to encourage the purplization of red states. It's going to make red states purplish over time.''

Black voters made up a larger percentage of Democratic primary voters this year in several states than in the last two presidential election years, according to exit polls conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the National Election Pool of television networks and The Associated Press this year and in 2004, and by the Voter News Service in 2000. In Maryland, for example, black voters rose to 47 percent of the total, up from 35 percent in 2004 and 28 percent in 2000.

Ronald W. Walters, a professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, who worked for the 1984 presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said of Mr. Obama, ''He's generated a tremendous force in American political culture outside the electoral system.''

Still, it would take a shift in the electoral dynamic -- a substantial stumble by John McCain, for instance -- for Mr. Obama to put in play a state like Mississippi, where whites gave John Kerry only about 15 percent of their vote in 2004 and where voting in presidential elections is perhaps more racially polarized than anywhere else in the nation. Even with a heavy black turnout, Mr. Bositis estimated, Mr. Obama would have to increase his white percentage by at least a third, to about 20 percent, to win the state.

''I don't anticipate him winning Mississippi,'' Mr. Bositis said, even though it has a higher percentage of blacks than any other state, 36 percent.

Many of the votes on Tuesday for Mr. Childers -- an anti-abortion, pro-gun-rights Democrat -- were from whites who will in all likelihood pull the lever for Mr. McCain in November, analysts and voters themselves say.

''Obama, he's too off-the-wall,'' said Chappell Sides, a white Republican-leaning voter in Yalobusha County who said he was preparing to punch the button for Mr. Childers on Tuesday. ''Hillary -- I thought I hated her, till Obama came along.''

Bruce Oppenheimer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, said the question was not so much whether Mr. Obama would carry Mississippi as whether he would force Republicans to spend time and money in the state.

Yet one sure lesson of the surprising Congressional result from northern Mississippi is that the use of Mr. Obama as an electoral tactic -- Republicans resorted to it heavily in the contest -- is at best a double-edged sword. At worst it is a guillotine for Republican candidates in areas with substantial black populations, like the Mississippi district won by Mr. Childers, where 26 percent are African-American. Indeed, Tuesday's Mississippi vote emerged as a case study in the effects and consequences of focusing on Mr. Obama.

''We realized the Republican machine was on the attack,'' said Mr. Buck, the state representative who helped Mr. Childers. ''They wanted to say he was tied to Barack Obama. The question we asked was, What's wrong with that? We wanted to prove to them that there's nothing wrong in Mississippi with a person being tied to Barack Obama.''

Between an initial vote on April 22, when Mr. Childers fell just shy of getting the 50 percent he needed to win, and Tuesday's runoff election, when he won with a decisive 54 percent, the Republican campaign to link Mr. Childers with Mr. Obama intensified, with a barrage of advertisements specifically on that theme. Perhaps not coincidentally, vote totals in counties with large black populations went up sharply between those two dates. In Marshall County, which is 48.8 percent black, the votes nearly doubled, to 5,083. In Clay County, 56.8 black, nearly 1,500 more people voted, pushing the total to 3,898.

The attacks on Mr. Obama clearly had a galvanizing effect, local officials said. ''The people I talked to said, 'Man, I don't like that they're trying to use Obama against him,' '' said Eric Powell, a black state senator who helped in voter turnout efforts. ''It actually helped Travis.''

PHOTOS: Travis W. Childers won a surprise victory in Mississippi, thanks largely to a surge in black voters. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL H. MILLER/ASSOCIATED PRESS); A voter on May 3 in Baton Rouge, La. Don Cazayoux, a Democrat, won the election for a House seat in a Republican stronghold. (PHOTOGRAPH BY LIZ CONDO/ADVOCATE)